Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
Some schools have been incorrectly recording students as absent and there's a national push to ensure they get it right.
The Education Ministry said some schools were marking students absent on days when the school was closed or when students were merely late to class.
"We've seen cases where students are incorrectly marked absent - such as being late but within the school's threshold, or attending approved offsite learning but coded as absent," the ministry said.
"Also, on days when schools are closed (e.g. teacher-only days or strikes), no attendance data should be recorded - yet sometimes it is."
Last week, parents with students at a Wellington secondary school told RNZ their children had been marked absent when the school was closed due to a teachers' strike.
The Secondary Principals Association said the ministry's work was responsible for improved attendance figures.
However, the ministry said it had not changed the rules and the effect of more accurate records would be slight.
"While correcting errors like marking students absent on closed days may slightly affect attendance figures, the code updates themselves do not artificially improve rates," it said.
Meanwhile the ministry said it was working with 600 schools that were "facing attendance challenges".
"Support varies - from improving data quality and coding practices to strengthening community engagement and attendance leadership," it said.
The government wanted 80 percent of students attending regularly, meaning they attended school more than 90 percent of the time, by 2030.
Regular attendance had been improving since reaching record lows in 2022.
In term 1 this year, 66 percent of school students attended regularly and in term 2 the figure was 58 percent.
Secondary Principals Association president Louise Anaru said in some cases there were discrepancies of as much as 10 percentage points between schools' attendance data and the ministry's figures for the same schools.
"There's a few data issues there," she said.
"The ministry are looking to support schools to make sure that data is cleared up. That of course will have an impact and... we have seen an increase in attendance data as a result."
Anaru said schools' student management systems automatically coded students as truant if no entry was made for them, which sometimes happened on when a school was closed on a week-day.
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